In the course of operating a computer on a network, computer application processes need to access the host computer's file system through a variety of system calls. In systems of the prior art, when the file system is corrupt, the software requesting access to a file system resource will hang, often with no way to be killed, or terminated. Problem elements of the file system are bad disk sectors, bad inode table, full inode table, bad FAT tables, etc. Once the software hangs, it is necessary for the user to reboot the system in order to resume. The system is rebooted so that the operating system (OS) will exclude the corrupt file system from being mounted. Once the software hangs, it usually requires a user to personally either reboot the system or repair the corrupted file system.
Problems with a corrupt file system are even more critical with the widespread use of storage area networks (SANs). More and more network devices now attempt to access storage file systems of the SAN. The benefits of SANs, e.g., storage scalability, availability, and flexibility, are becoming clearer as the entire IT industry adopts this storage topology. As SANs grow to accommodate the growth in storage requirements, the task of managing this business-critical resource, without increasing staff, becomes daunting.
To help customers manage their SANs, a powerful, integrated suite of SAN-management software products, collectively called OpenView Storage Area Manager (OVSAM), have been developed and are available through the Hewlett-Packard Company. These products provide a single, centralized solution for managing a SAN. The products automatically discover storage devices, interconnect devices, and hosts, to enable a user to proactively manage more storage with less effort.